This is a nasty piece of work: The New York Times, in excruciating detail, tells us Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is a phony and a drunk and a whore and an Irishwoman and a narcissist*. Outside of clubbing baby harp seals, there's little infamy not outlined, including the facts she's a drug abuser and an attorney, and the Times lifted its paywall to maximize the hit piece's reach.
I enjoyed it for the usual reasons that go with being a flawed human being. Envy, however, isn't one of them. Like many, I have no love for the tech industry and the people who work in it. (Shanahan seems an exemplary member.) I suppose I could go into excruciating detail as to why; suffice it to say they seem weird in the most unpleasant way and their weirdness effects my life, often in an unpleasant way. If they get slapped around in the press from time to time, it's nothing to me.
Still, is it necessary to know Shanahan once got so fucked up at a party she needed an IV to recover? (That's the least of her sins, according to the article.) The Times normally wouldn't pay heed to her outside a story in its Vows section, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. ain't going to be president. What gives?
It can't, or shouldn't, be that Bobby Kennedy Jr. represents an existential threat to Joe Biden's second term. While it's almost impossible to argue with the piece's conclusion Shanahan was picked over Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura because she has a billion and a lot of it in cash - the Times didn't make up all this shit about her! - BKJ's too politically polyglot to make a difference. On net, he probably takes a few more votes away from Biden than he does from Trump, but he's no Ross Perot.** If Biden loses, he'll do so on his own merits.
Here's guessing the piece is an agonal gasp of the Kennedys as they fade into political and societal oblivion. This isn't simply in the sense the Kennedy family writ large is going after Bobby Jr. for betraying their ancestral political party - though it's easy to imagine, say, Teddy Jr. on a pay phone telling the Times reporter, "You know what else I heard about that cunt? In Miami she..." - it's the Kennedy's mystique, such as it is, asserting itself in the collective unconscious as it fades away.
As Caroline Kennedy discovered during her disastrous run for New York governor, the Kennedys aren't suited for jobs. They are suited for roles. They are not dissimilar to British royalty save they are less popular. Like royalty, their roles are clear. Take the sinecure at the UN. Organize the fundraiser. Write an op-ed about the disabled. Show up at the Vinyard or the Hamptons. Do all that shit and STFU.
BJK - neither to his credit nor to his dishonor by my lights - decided he wasn't going to play that role. He had seemed suited to it, what with campaigning against nuclear reactors or saving a bunch of fish, but it wasn't satisfying, apparently, and it doesn't matter whether it was unsatisfying for idealistic or narcissistic reasons or both. It's now a fact. Certain people who remember the Kennedys, however vague those memories may be, have determined it is a bad fact, nominally because they think he hurts their guy but mostly because Bobby has gone off script. It isn't a rational belief.
If attacking Kennedys were up to me, I wouldn't bother, but gun-to-head I'd go after the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole Kennedy blob. Even if you stipulate JFK had an S on his chest and Bobby Sr. was the messiah - both stipulations are difficult, the latter particularly so - since the early 1970s the Kennedys have been a grotesque folly. They've been a menace. The only question is whether this menace has been directed outwardly (Chappaquiddick) or inwardly (drug overdoses, lost legs, babysitters, etc., etc.).
The vast majority of the electorate either doesn't remember them or doesn't care. Only political weirdos - those obsessive lunatics who think everything is about power - do. If Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s an issue, that's fine. I'd only ask you take the entire family with him.
*She's also an attractive woman, which is obviously a plus but on rare occasions serves to sharpen the knives when people decide she sucks. I'd take being a six if it meant avoiding the lashes we nines and tens get now and then.
**There's a notion that BKJ takes more votes from Trump which could only come from a political reporter as currently constituted. The conspiratorially minded already have their candidate and it's Donald Trump.
Nicole Shanahan and her running mate
Comments